Liz Truss hopes to fight the Tory leadership campaign as a re-run of Brexit

I had assumed that Liz Truss would do enough homework to give her two-word pitch for the Conservative leadership, “tax cuts”, at least a semblance of credibility. There is, after all, a reasonable case to be made for borrowing a bit more than planned while the economy faces the threat of recession.

But in her interview on the BBC Today programme this morning, she simply failed to make it, burbling on about “the supply side” instead. You didn’t have to know anything about economics to know that she was busking it.

How naive of me, though, to imagine that she thinks that this is a problem. Her strategy became clear when she echoed Michael Gove’s assault on “experts” during the EU referendum campaign: “We have had a consensus of the Treasury, of economists, of the Financial Times and other outlets peddling a particular type of economic policy for the last 20 years but it hasn’t delivered growth.”

She wants to fight the leadership campaign as a re-run of the Brexit battle, in which she poses as the disrupter and paints Rishi Sunak as the establishment candidate. Any attempt by Sunak to point out boring economic realities will be taken as evidence that he is a prisoner of the elite.

It shouldn’t work. She voted Remain, whereas Sunak has been a consistent Leaver. But then Boris Johnson faced both ways on the issue before he chose a side. So perhaps she can persuade party members that she really is the “continuity Johnson” candidate.

Her assault on the economic policy “of the last 20 years” is also a weird one. She has been a member of the government for the past decade, and the idea that “not putting up corporation tax next year and spending vastly more on defence by 2030” amounts to a totally different economic model is the kind of delusion Labour Party members have sometimes been prey to.

That part of her interview reminded me of Ed Miliband dissing the economic assumptions of the entire Thatcher and New Labour period, as if that was one seamless period of awfulness. Unfortunately, from the country’s point of view, Ed Miliband’s experiment with the idea of an alternative economic model was not followed by a return to reality.

Instead, it proved a gateway drug to the Jeremy Corbyn hallucination, which was in some respects a mirror-image of Truss’s programme. Corbyn proposed vast increases in taxes, although he was if anything more orthodox than she is in promising to borrow only for capital investment.

What Truss, the Brexit campaign and Corbyn all have in common, however, is that they promise dramatic if unspecified change. “I know about the Treasury from having worked there,” Truss told the Today programme. “They do have an economic orthodoxy. And they do resist change. And what people in Britain desperately need now is change.”

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

This suggests there are two questions that may decide who will win the Tory leadership. One is: How Corbynite is the Tory party membership? Truss is so confident that the members want to believe in the magic powers of the “tax cuts” mantra that she didn’t bother to set out how more borrowing could be sustainable in the medium term. Sunak has to point out to them that Keir Starmer would rather face Truss at the next general election than him – because her tax-cut talk will be portrayed as ushering in a new era of “austerity”.

The other question is: Who will Michael Gove support? Once again, Gove is a decisive figure in the history of the Conservative Party and the nation. In 2016, his defection from David Cameron to the Brexit cause paved the way for Boris Johnson and made winning the referendum possible.

Now, he could decide the outcome of this contest. If he backs Truss, it will make it easier for her to portray Sunak as the candidate of the Treasury orthodoxy and the elite establishment. If he backs Sunak, it will be easier for the rich former chancellor to fight as the candidate who will deliver on the Brexit promise of change.